MVN - Most Valuable Network

Andrew Blauner Interview

By Ryan McNeill

After reading through Andrew Blauner’s book “Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference” this winter I was surprised to see that Andrew had come across my site and took the time to write up an email last week to thank me for mentioning his book in some posts I recently wrote about Al McGuire. After exchanging some emails I summoned up the courage to ask Andrew for 20 minutes of his time for an interview about his book and he graciously accepted.

Last week I had the chance to chat with Andrew Blauner about his book and after listening to this interview again while doing post-production I feel this is one of the better podcasts I have recorded so far. Some of the topics that we covered include:

• Why he choose to write a book about coaches
• If he needed to approach writers to contribute or if they contacted him
• What it was like to get some of his favourite writers to contribute to this book
• My favourite chapter in his book was the one that Frank Deford wrote on Al McGuire. Andrew gives listeners some insight into this chapter and why he included it even though he grew up as a Notre Dame fan
• One of the more interesting chapters was chapter written by Jane Leavy called “Coaching Bob” that deals with a woman being a “death coach” to a man. Andrew tells listeners a about this chapter and explains how this article found it’s way into the book about sports.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Ryan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.